Face-lift

The last time this department looked into the Eldridge Street Synagogue, down in Ben Shahn country, near the Manhattan Bridge, was almost twenty years ago, when the restoration of the synagogue—the first and the grandest of the temples built by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe—was just beginning. Decades of enforced neglect had left the sanctuary sealed off and with pigeons roosting in the rafters. It was, this magazine’s correspondent wrote then, “like the Twilight Zone. The room was covered with dust. There were prayer shawls strewn about, and ceramic spittoons on the floor. . . . In the ark were thirty Torahs, in various stages of decomposition.” This week, at last, the work is complete, with a spiffiness that would have been inconceivable in that less flush time for the city and the neighborhood. And though the project may have set some sort of Landmarks Preservation Commission record (Longest Time for Continuous Restoration, Synagogue), it has also returned the grand, stained-glass-and-polished-wood- neo-Moorish-Yiddish-Romanesque-Renaissance-Gothic-You-Find-a-Name-for-It space back to its neighborhood and to New Yorkers. Walk down Eldridge Street now and you see the synagogue, almost hallucinatory in its luminosity, wedged in among the workaday tenements and Chinese storefronts like a bright and happy dollhouse.

Eldridge opened in 1887, when four local Jewish merchants—a sausage king, a plate-glass dealer, a banker, and a realestate guy—hired a heretofore undistinguished architectural firm called Herter Brothers to build them a synagogue. But the restoration has returned the temple to the way it was in 1907, when electricity was installed, and a row of light bulbs was used to edge a panel displaying the Ten Commandments, in the style of a marquee. The glory of the synagogue is the scale of its interior—a seventy-foot-high-by-thirty-foot-wide barrel vault, whose two-tiered design (the second tier, which wraps around three sides, rather than being just at the back, was originally meant for Orthodox women) makes it seem even higher than it is and gives it spectacular acoustics. The first thing that the founders did was to bring in Pinchas Minkowsky, a then legendary cantor from Odessa, for the then immense sum of fifteen thousand dollars, on a then unheard-of five-year contract—the cantorial A-Rod of his time.

“The synagogue was the first grand gesture on the part of the Eastern European Jews who were arriving in New York,” Annie Polland, the house historian, explained the other day, as final touches were being put on hand-stencilled wall decorations. “Until then, the new congregations took over old Protestant churches. Eldridge was built not just as a statement to the neighborhood but as a statement to the German Jews uptown.” Central Synagogue, on Lexington Avenue, and an earlier edition of Temple Emanu-El, on Grand and Clinton Streets, had already opened; Eldridge, downtown, was defiantly grand, and insistently “Orthodox,” a word that was already in use. “When you bought a seat to pray at Eldridge, the contract promised that if the congregation ever allowed organ music, or men and women singing together in the choir, you’d get double your money back,” Polland said. “It was a strong anti-Reform statement.”

The circumstances that led to the gradual neglect of the sanctuary are familiar, though: as Jews moved away from the neighborhood, it became harder and harder to summon a minyan. Finally, in the nineteen-fifties, the worshippers moved into a small room below the great sanctuary for their services. The two dozen members who have held on throughout the renovation are still down there. The restored sanctuary will be used for services on holidays and special occasions, but it’s also going to be open to the public as a museum of the immigrant experience on the Lower East Side.

“There aren’t many Jews moving here, but I hope the congregation will expand,” Polland said. “The hipster Jews are back,” she added with a laugh. As she looked around the shining space, she lowered her voice and murmured, “They say that there’s a lot of numerological significance encoded in the proportions of Eldridge. There are twelve windows upstairs for the twelve tribes, and five downstairs for the five books, but my favorite is that there are four doors leading into the synagogue, perhaps symbolizing the four matriarchs—Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca, and Leah. Three of them are also the names of three of the wives of the four merchants who founded it. They got in somehow.”

She walked over, past the restored bimah, or pulpit, and opened the door of the ark. “I’ve heard that the velvet lining of the ark is unchanged from the day the synagogue opened, because it’s been completely protected from light and air,” she said. She cautiously slid open the door. Inside, the pleated red velvet looked as fresh and festive as the icing on a birthday cake—direct from 1887, and still as good as new. ♦

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986.